New Joiner with a tuner problem

[ogden1583]

Hi all,

Have scoured this website many times searching for the elusive, hoping that someone out there had already come across a problem I am having, so have signed up to put my question to the panel.

I have recently put together a Vista Home Premium machine hoping to replace the bulk of my AV equipment. It's fairly simple in so far as I have kept the equipment list to a minimum. Gigabyte EP35-DS3P with Q6600 processor, 4GB RAM, WD500GB Drive and an LG Blu-Ray, lastly, I chucked in a HVR2200 tuner and wrapped it all up in a Zalman case with a nifty screen on the front.

The problem I have is the TV pause function in Vista MCE. When I pause live TV, the system starts to play again after a random amount of time and when it does start to play again, it has forgotten all that it stored prior to re-commencing play.

I have adjusted the buffer in the registry and installed the latest Hauppage drivers. I thought the problem may be a power fluctuation so plugged everything into a big-ass UPS but nothing seems to make a difference.

If I use WINTV6, there doesn't seem to be a problem with pausing for hours at a time but I find the picture quality (and occasional playback stutter) to be less than optimum. PLus the MCE interface is much more intuitive / easy to use for the rest of the family who don't share my enthusiasm for troubleshooting and generally geeking around.

The other thing MCE seems incapable of is gleaning information about the current program and upcoming program from the DVB(T) signal - a real neat feature on my old Philips DVD/Tuner and on WINTV.

Well, this is quite an introductory spray, didn't realise I had it in me. So if any one out there has had a similar problem or can shed some light / divine a path for me to tread, it would be greatly appreciated.

Cheers.

[dgaust]

You'll most likely find it's not a problem with your tuner, but the June Cumulative update for mediacentre. This introduced a weird issue with videos/liveTV restarting after a period of time.

You can either roll back the update, or hope Microsoft fix it soon (they've acknowledged the problem).

[ogden1583]

Thanks for that.

When I called the "Helpline" boys at Microsoft, they told me to get a technician in. Had the problem from the word go when I put things together in May and it persisted with the Service Pack upgrade in June.

I agree that the problem isn't the tuner since things are fine with WINTV 6. Hope it settles down with a future patch from Seattle.

Cheers.

[dgaust]

Didn't realise it had been going for that long, so it's probably not the patch causing the issue. What's the average time it takes before it unpauses?

As for the guide info over the air, the MCE software doesn't currently use this for the guide. There are two pretty good options, either FreeEPG (free obviously) or IceTV.

[ogden1583]

As I mentioned, it seems totally random which was why I suspected power surges from the fridge which is apparently on the same circuit (though in a different room - before you ask). It generally only takes 10-15 minutes before it starts playing again with no memory of what it had stored while it was paused. If you click the back button, you can only go back as far as when it started playing again.

To date, I haven't run any trials on pausing as I generally leave the room and return to find it playing again.

I just checked something and despite altering the registry twice it seems to have put back the original settings (or ignored my input). The entry for "BackingStoreEachFileDurationSeconds" keeps returning to a value of 300. I have tried changing this to 1200 but maybe i missed a valuable step like "Save New Values" though I can't see this option anywhere. Then again, if this value of 300 is meant to equal half an hour, it doesn't quite explain things.

I hope i was changing the right registry entry. The info I got from one of the threads on this site said to change the "BackingFileDuration" and I changed the entry that fitted that description most closely.

And here's another weird feature I just tested. If I record live TV and press the pause button, it quite happily holds the pause for at least an hour (that's all i've needed so far today). This will have to satisfy as my work-around for the time being.

I should check to see if it unpauses music or recorded programs.

Stay tuned....so to speak